Bishops’ Sermons
I am made thoughtful by a remark of Christopher Isherwood’s cited by Zachary Leader in a review of Katherine Bucknell’s new life. It concern the turning of Isherwood, ‘an unlikely convert’, to Vedanta. He explained it thus: ‘My prejudices were largely semantic. I could only approach the subject of mystical religion with the aid of a brand-new vocabulary. Sanskrit supplied it. Here were a lot of new words, exact, antiseptic, uncontaminated by association with bishops’ sermons, schoolmasters’ lectures, politicians’ speeches.’ Isherwood, as Leader remarks, did not have much of a predisposition for the chastity and asceticism Vedanta presupposes; but that is by the by. His point is an important one, it seems to me. At the best of times, bishops’ sermons have been charged with the irreducible newness of the Gospel, a resonance audible, for example, in the Ambrosian texts the breviary has given us this week. When did they turn tedious? How to convey Christ’s perennial novelty today? The question is an essential one.
